Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  They are discussing hate crimes at the moment.

  A woman at the table says that hate crimes are on the rise. She offers statistics. Racial crimes are up sixty percent. Religious, overall, are up forty percent, but hate crimes against Jews are up a whopping ninety-two percent. Crimes against children are even worse. Crimes against children are up over two hundred percent. She is ready to continue, but the man opposite her interrupts. He does not think that crimes against children can be classified as hate crimes. And why not, she wants to know. Because, the man replies, crimes against children are a separate category. This doesn’t mean that he doesn’t deplore such crimes, it simply means that as a category … This time the woman interrupts him. What else but hate, she wants to know, can explain crimes against children? Is he also aware of the fact that children have become the victims of choice of most Americans? Yes, he is aware of that fact, he is also aware of the fact that children have become the victims of choice of other children as well, but that still doesn’t mean such crimes should be included in the category of hate crimes. Hate crimes, in his opinion, and not just his alone, are crimes that …

  My waiter comes. He brings my bill, bows, and leaves.

  I have an account here and all I have to do is sign my name. I leave huge tips for anyone on the staff who so much as comes near me.

  Dianah returns, fully composed, tears gone, hair brushed. She is Ms. Sisyphus incarnate. Ready to resume her unending toil of trying to roll me up the steep incline to the summit of health and happiness. She knows that it’s a hopeless and thankless task she has set for herself, but she can no sooner turn her back on me than she can on those doomed elephants that adorn her beautiful blue dress. It’s just the way she is. A nurturer at heart.

  We leave together. I stagger a little, to keep up appearances. I lean on her for support, doing one of my better imitations of a hopeless drunk.

  There are no hard feelings between us. None at all.

  It’s neither warm nor cold outside. It’s March, but it feels like May. It’s been May since January.

  As in some huge illuminated aquarium, Sixth Avenue is full of cabs moving past us like schools of goldfish.

  I hail one of them.

  I open the door and hold it open for her. She slides across the seat, making room for me to come inside.

  “I feel like walking,” I tell her.

  I light a cigarette and head uptown. My beard feels like a dog that I’m taking for a walk. It precedes me, as if it knows the way back to my apartment.

  8

  Lincoln Center is letting out as I go by. Hundreds of people with Playbills in their hands. They run, hurtling themselves off the sidewalk, arms desperately waving at the taxicabs. It’s like a scene from one of those disaster-at-sea movies. Only so many lifeboats to go around. The able-bodied men run on ahead to secure a taxicab, while the women and children and the infirm remain behind, huddled together in little groups. They can only hope and pray now.

  A new mood is beginning to rise slowly inside my head.

  Dianah’s contention that the woman I thought was Billy’s mother was just a fantasy or fabrication no longer disappoints me. The doubt I now feel about the woman’s identity seems liberating. Whereas I had serious moral qualms in contemplating my pursuit of her when I was certain that she was Billy’s mother, I now have none. I’m now free to set things in motion, should I choose to do so. To make my phone calls. To find out her name. Her address. To befriend her. To insinuate myself into her life. To find out who she is.

  An ever-so-fine drizzle, so fine that it almost seems a mist, starts to fall.

  9

  Seventy-second and Broadway. Tomorrow’s Sunday Times are stacked up outside the news vendor’s on the corner. A steady stream of people are buying them, leaving with the papers in their arms.

  The sidewalks are crowded with people. Heading home. Away from home. Homeless. All kinds.

  The old man in my father’s overcoat is nowhere to be seen. I pass the corner where I first caught sight of him, and the bench where we sat. I have not exactly been looking for him, but I have expected to see him again, as if we had made an arrangement to do so. I now recognize this idea for what it is. It’s the Hollywood hack in me at work. A rewriter who sets up minor characters early on so that they can then reappear for the payoff. Nobody in the scripts I’ve rewritten appears just once. The only reason they exist in the first place is so that they can reappear for the payoff. Their whole reason for being is to be somebody’s payoff.

  I know, of course, that there is a big difference between real life and the scripts I rewrite. The lives of most people are neither character-driven nor plot-driven, but driven by random currents, trends, and moods. Lives that are moody rather than plotty. I’m well aware of this, but the rewriter in me wishes that life too could be rewritten at times.

  It starts to rain for real.

  Despite the rain, there’s a line on the corner of Eighty-sixth Street to buy the Sunday Times. Those leaving with their papers clutch them to their bosoms to protect them from the rain. The image is almost maternal, or paternal, depending on their sex. It brings to mind, at least it does to my mind, an image from an old movie. The townspeople in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers leaving the distribution center where they picked up their pea pods and hurrying away, each holding the pea pod of his replication tightly in his arms.

  I pay for my Times and, clutching it to my bosom like the others, I trot on due west toward Riverside Drive.

  10

  It’s a little after midnight when I get to my apartment.

  I stick the videocassette into my VCR and fast-forward to the scene in the restaurant. I light a cigarette and watch the scene yet again. My eyes go from her face to Billy’s photograph on top of the TV. Whatever resemblance I saw between the two before, I now either don’t see anymore or do see, but it no longer matters in quite the same way. I hear her laughter. It’s either the exact same laughter as the laughter of that fourteen-year-old girl on the telephone, or it’s not. The crisis I had about what to do with this woman on my TV screen is gone. I’m no longer aware of having any crisis.

  I strip off my clothes and head for the shower, making a sudden executive decision as I get into the shower stall to shave off my beard.

  The hot water feels wonderfully soothing in both the tactile and acoustical senses as it falls on my shoulders. Steam rises inside the shower stall. The steam covers the glass door. What had been transparent becomes opaque.

  I have an office on West Fifty-seventh Street, but in many ways this is my office. It’s in the shower that I resolve conflicts, gain insights, come to terms with whatever terms are left to come to terms with. It was in this very shower that I conceived of my Ulysses in Space movie, and it’s in this shower that I return to the subject from time to time to embellish the conception.

  I do so now.

  I see the solar schooner with a mile-high solar sail sailing through space and time. I see the scene with the sirens as something from MTV. Ulysses, tied to the mast, gets to see videos of what he has missed by being away from home for all those years. He sees the scenes he could have had with his son Telemachus but can never have now. Or can he? The tantalizing images spun into being by the sirens’ songs torment him with what could have been. He tears at the ropes that bind him to the mast.

  I shave.

  Having shaved, I move on and shampoo my hair. The shampoo I use is made especially for frequent users like myself.

  I feel so relaxed that even the iron grip of my prostate loosens and I pee freely for the first time in a long time. I think of Dianah.

  She was wrong to call me a potential killer who is full of anger and hate. I am angry at no one. I hate no one, not even Cromwell, whom I want to hate. I have never caused premeditated harm to anyone.

  On the other hand, I do lack the willpower to stop myself from hurting others in passing, in the day-to-day living of my life, in the mere process of being who I am.


  My ability to cause harm has been limited up to now only by my limited opportunities to do so. I know, because I know myself, that I’m capable of causing much greater harm than I have, perhaps even killing somebody, should such an opportunity arise. It’s not that I want anyone’s blood on my hands, it’s just that I would be unable to keep myself from spilling it.

  This character trait of mine is cause for concern, and I concern myself with it. It kicks around inside my head like a chunk of carrot inside a Cuisinart. But even as it kicks around, it gets smaller and smaller, until finally it loses all significance. It joins the list of other concerns, thoughts, and insights in the psychic soup of my mind.

  My former crises and concerns are now indistinguishable from one another. There is a great sense of freedom and peace in knowing that I can do neither right nor wrong, because in the undifferentiated broth of my mind there is no difference between right and wrong.

  The hot water continues to fall from the showerhead. The steam rises and thickens. In the egalitarian democracy of my mind, there is tranquillity and total equality. All is soup.

  PART TWO

  Los Angeles

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  HER NAME WAS Leila Millar. Millar with an a but pronounced, as the ever-helpful Brad in Cromwell’s office had hastened to inform me, “Miller.”

  I was flying to LA to meet her.

  When I called Brad, my intention was only to get her name and phone number. The rest, I thought, would follow in the days to come. But the rest followed right away.

  Brad told me that there were quite a few scenes “with the young lady in question” that had been cut from the print I saw. If I wanted to see any of those scenes, or any of the other scenes Mr. Houseman had cut, all I had to do was say when.

  “She lives in Venice,” Brad said and then laughed in that bleating way of his. “The one in California.”

  He gave me her address. I wrote it down.

  I was about to thank him and hang up, when he asked, “Would you like me to take care of your travel arrangements?”

  Why not, I thought. If I’m going to do what I’m going to do sooner or later anyway.

  “Why not?” I told Brad.

  Brad took care of everything, the flight, the limo to Kennedy and from LA, the hotel, the rent-a-car waiting for me in the hotel parking lot.

  In the aria of accommodations, his mellifluous, self-effacing voice almost put me in a hypnotic trance. Hearing him talk was like getting a haircut, a manicure, and having my shoes shined at the same time. The details of my trip, as rendered by his voice, were made to seem matters of vital importance. It made me want to have a Brad of my own.

  2

  I was half-napping when our pilot announced over the PA system that we were flying over Chicago.

  He sounded like an honest man and I took his word for it, because when I opened my eyes and looked down, all I saw were clouds.

  Chicago served as a marker on my trips to LA, indicating that we were a third of the way there.

  A pang for my mother, like the sound of one of those submarine sonar devices, bounced off my heart.

  I was very familiar, too familiar, with the house down below in which she now lived alone. Perhaps she was at this very moment walking aimlessly through it, east to west, and, perhaps, as the plane flew over it, the two of us were in synch for a split second, heading aimlessly in the same direction.

  I hadn’t seen her since my father’s funeral.

  There were no unresolved issues between us. We had both resolved them a long time ago. We had come to terms with each other in what’s popularly known as a very healthy way. There was no hostility between us. No scores to settle. No need to get even. My relationship with my mother was in many respects exactly the same as my relationship with Dianah. We were separated, but not completely divorced as yet. No hard feelings on either side.

  The only real thing left between my mother and me was a memory of a single moment. For all I knew, she had forgotten all about it.

  On my way to LA, I had stopped over to see my dad and her. He was still healthy and sane at the time and was working in court that afternoon. I sat in the kitchen, smoking and drinking tea, watching my mother wipe the dust off the wooden windowsill above the sink.

  Our teas together were always like this. She would ask me if I wanted a cup of tea. If I said yes, she made a cup for me, but not for herself. If I said no, it was the other way around. One of us was always watching the other drink tea.

  She had watched me drink mine and then, driven by some addiction for doing useless chores in my presence, she began wiping the dust off the windowsill with a damp cloth.

  The kitchen window faced west, and by the light of the afternoon sun, as if she were illuminated by a spotlight, I saw how old she had become. The thought that this old woman had given birth to me made my own life seem as ancient as something written on clay tablets in cuneiform.

  Suddenly, as she moved her hand across the wooden sill, she cried out in pain and pulled back her hand.

  I stood up and said, “Mom, are you all right?”

  She shuffled toward me, holding out her right index finger.

  There, in that old index finger she brought for my inspection, I saw a thin splinter of wood and a small droplet of blood.

  What I saw didn’t look like a living human finger at all but a dead piece of wood which the splinter, wood itself, had entered. The thought that this old piece of wood could feel pain and bleed horrified me.

  I pulled back from her. From that fingertip and that trembling droplet of blood. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it.

  My mother, realizing the mistake she had made in bringing her little hurt to me, came to her senses and almost apologized for the blunder. Contrite and embarrassed, she turned around and shuffled back to the kitchen sink, where she let some water from the tap run on her fingertip.

  The next day I left, as planned, for LA.

  The tiny splinter, I knew, had long departed from her flesh. The broken epidermal cells, even at her age, had long since replicated themselves and covered the break in the skin, so that no visible mark remained of the incident.

  Like some miser, however, I clung to the memory of that afternoon, as if it were a precious stone.

  It required a conscious effort on my part to keep my mind from dissolving the memory of that moment in the kitchen with my mother. It took work to keep the splinter in my mind. What I got in return was that each time I flew over Chicago, I had the satisfaction of feeling a little discomfort for the way I had behaved that day. This discomfort was neither intense nor prolonged, but it sufficed to persuade me that I was still an active member of the human race.

  3

  It was almost eight P.M. when we arrived in L.A. A tall limo driver met me at the baggage area, holding up a sign with my name on it.

  The baggage carousel began to turn. For the first time in my life at any airport, domestic or foreign, my suitcase was the first one to appear. I took it as a good omen of something.

  The limo that Brad had arranged to pick me up was a stretch limo, but try as I might, I couldn’t stretch myself out far enough to take full advantage of all the comfort and space it offered.

  It was dark outside, and made to seem even darker by the limousine’s tinted windows. I cracked open a window and lit a cigarette.

  Venice was close to the airport, and as we drove past several exits that could have taken us there, I couldn’t help thinking about Leila. But since I didn’t really know her, I didn’t really know what to think about her. Lacking any specifics, or freed from the burden of specifics, I let myself think anything I wanted to think about her, meaning, I suppose, that what I was doing was thinking about myself.

  4

  My lobster-pink sixth-floor suite was enormous, but I had expected nothing less. I have been flown out to LA enough times to be able to predict the sumptuousness of my accommodations by the size of the limo that picks me up at the airport.
No limo means a single room. A town car means a junior suite. A stretch limo, a stretch suite.

  Awaiting me were two bottles of champagne and two baskets of fruit. The smaller basket of fruit and the smaller, less expensive bottle of champagne were from the hotel management, a token of their appreciation for my being a loyal customer. The other, larger basket and the other, much larger and much more expensive bottle of champagne were from Cromwell. A faxed note came with them, written in longhand and sent from Leningrad.

  “Saul, you bloody genius, welcome on board. If you need anything, just call Brad.

  “Looking forward to seeing you in person next Saturday. Regards, Jay.”

  It was late. I was tired but not sleepy and there was nowhere to go, so I unpacked slowly, methodically, trying to stretch out the activity for as long as possible.

  It pleased me to learn that Cromwell had been informed about my trip to LA.

  After taking care of my accommodations, Brad had returned to the topic of the cut footage from the film. When was I interested in seeing it? I wasn’t interested in seeing it at all but I had to justify my stay in LA somehow, so I agreed to see it on Monday. Brad told me that he would reserve a screening room for me.

  Cromwell, I was sure, knew all about it and was probably interpreting my arrival and my arrangements to see the cut footage as a sign that I was seriously considering accepting the assignment. It wasn’t often that I was in this wonderful fail-safe position of being able to arouse and then to dash Cromwell’s expectations in such a pleasant way. It pleased me to think of him being somewhere in Leningrad and counting on me.

  This was Friday. According to his note, he would be back in LA next Saturday. I would be back in New York by then. It pleased me to imagine him calling my hotel only to be informed that I had checked out the night before.

  If there was one thing I was certain of, it was that I could do nothing to damage the brilliant film I had seen. Its integrity was safe from me, not because of any personal integrity I possessed but because the film itself was so perfect. Even had I been eager to alter it, I could have found nothing there to alter.